One egg, cooked any style, would cost you $1 at Ruth’s Restaurant in 1980, according to an ad in The Augusta Chronicle.

How times have changed. At Ruth’s in 2022, that same egg will now cost you $1.25.

“We’re probably the lowest-priced food for breakfast and lunch in the area at the moment,” said Pete Garland, who’s owned Ruth’s Family Restaurant with his wife, Dee, since 2011.

The Garlands are the most recent of a string of owners who have bought the unpretentious diner at 3843 Washington Road in Martinez since its founder, Ruth Goodbread, died in 2013.

“She ate with us until the end,” Garland said. “She gave good advice, and she brought a crowd in.”

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Ruth’s serves “breakfast and Southern comfort food,” Garland said, with a meat-and-two-vegetable lunch featured for $8.99. Favorite breakfast entrees include Pete’s Trash Omelet, described on the menu as containing “everything we can find in the kitchen, topped with corned beef hash.” There’s also the He-Man Breakfast, which includes three eggs, a choice of bacon or sausage, and grits or home fries plus two pancakes.

While the diner doesn’t advertise as fast food, it’s not uncommon to "walk right in and be seated and get your drink order in front of you while you wait for your food,” Garland said. Seating capacity is fewer than 100, a total that’s usually approached on Saturdays and Sundays, when customers might have to wait 10 or 15 minutes for an available table.

Drawing from her restaurant experience at the University Grill formerly near the Medical College of Georgia, and the former Lakeside Diner on Gordon Highway, Goodbread owned and operated her own restaurants in the 1970s at 706 12th St., and in the 1980s at 1236 Gordon Highway, in a former Howard Johnson’s.

The remaining restaurant on Washington Road has changed ownership several times in the past 20 years or so, with the word “Family” making an appearance in the name, but the customer loyalty has stayed the same.

Mark Strickland lives in Appling, but eating at Ruth’s with family members one recent morning was a reminder of when he grew up in Martinez.  He’s eaten at Ruth’s “off and on I guess the whole time they’ve been open, just about,” he said. “I couldn't begin to put a time limit on it.”

This article originally appeared on Augusta Chronicle: Augusta Eats: Ruth's Family Restaurant is a comfort food time capsule